hm. It appears I'm off on my car prices. I thought japanese minivans were in that range, and with pool, those are really common. looking, they look closer to $30K than $40K if you don't spring for the extras. doing a survey of car manufacturer websites, my impression of how much vehicles cost appears to be around $10K high across the board. The base model honda accord is only $23K? that is way less than I thought.
I use uberx to work, and pool home most days; I've used select once. I think I get a Mercedes C-class at least once a week, some of them looking pretty new. Oddly, I almost never see BMWs. I remember the other night I got in some giant four door American pickup that looked new and very expensive, but I don't know enough about trucks to recognize the model to verify that impression.
Still, the standard Prius is gonna be like $400/month on a 60 month loan, and that's just the loan. I imagine that there would be much value in the vehicle after those 60 months, if you drove full time in it, and I imagine the Prius has lower operating costs than most vehicles in it's class.
I do occasionally get tiny economy cars... but not very often, which seems weird, as if the major cost was the car, you'd think drivers would optimize for that by buying smaller cars, but that doesn't seem to be the case.
Honestly, if you're buying a new vehicle to use for Uber you're insane. Perhaps they got more people roped into that or leasing than they ought to have and that's responsible for these issues. But you can get a used car that's more than adequate at a reasonable price even with terrible credit.
At least in my area, most of the vehicles have been 5+ year old Toyotas (almost entirely Camrys, and a Prius or two) that were likely purchased with over 100k miles on them. The nicest thing I was ever in was a new Honda Civic.
That'd be like 10K for another 100K miles? probably more with maintenance. I'm not sure that's a better deal than a $18K civic brand new, if you really planned for driving a few hundred thousand miles, especially when you factor in gas differentials.
My impression is that the cost per mile on new cars is pretty good if you actually drive them for a few hundred thousand miles. The savings on used cars mostly comes in if you don't plan on driving enough to wear a new car out before getting your next car; otherwise transaction costs can be... significant.
Leases have significant per mile fees. Your uber driver isn't staying below 15k miles a year.
You would either want a loan or a very high millage lease, both of which cost rather more.
But the interesting part is that I don't see so many of the smallest cars that would work for this, Even though while not that cheap, they are certainly cheaper than larger cars. I wonder why that is?
